Cherokee brings NMAI to Indian Country
By Staff Reports
WASHINGTON – The first time Carolyn McClellan visited Washington, D.C. – as the valedictorian of her high school class – she thought the U.S. Capital was about as far away from her home in northeast Oklahoma as the moon.
Now 56, this Cherokee Nation citizen and mother of three grown children is the new associate director of the National Museum of the American Indian, and she aims to make the distance between Indian communities and the museum become a lot smaller.
“We spent so much time getting the museum doors open and planning the exhibitions that we forgot to monitor these relationships,” she said.
Since joining the museum in May, McClellan has been traveling Indian Country and holding conversations about how the museum can be more connected with Native communities. Many Native people remember the museum’s opening in 2004 with pride, but say communication from the museum has fallen short since then.
“We hired Carolyn after a very thorough national search for people with an unusual combination of skills,” said NMAI Director Kevin Gover. “The most important, though, was her ability to work effectively with tribal communities.”
During the recent Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians conference on the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla reservation in Oregon, McClellan discussed with an elders committee the journey that brought her to NMAI.
“I wasn’t the first person in my family to graduate from college,” she said. “My oldest daughter was. I was the second.”
McClellan grew up in a house without running water, six miles from Talala, Okla. Her grandparents’ allotment was a working ranch where the family grew its own food and raised its own livestock. She had enough to do just helping out at home.
She married at 17 and had three children. When her marriage, which she says had turned abusive, ended more than a decade later she moved to California with her children. She sold real estate and made enough money to take her kids on vacation for the first time.
“I have come through the school of hard knocks, and I am not ashamed,” she said.
McClellan was 38 when her oldest daughter, Traci, was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley. She remembers Traci telling her, “Mother, you have to go to college.”
It took two years of her children’s encouragement, but at 40 McClellan enrolled in community college.
When her daughter went to the University of Arizona for graduate school, McClellan transferred there also, moving the family to Tucson.
Both received their degrees – McClellan’s a bachelor’s in anthropology – and got summer internships in Washington, her daughter at NMAI and McClellan at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. McClellan was asked back for three summers while she received her master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma.
It was during those summers that McClellan’s love for the nation’s capital blossomed.
In 1998, she went to work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where she was hired to establish a bureau-wide museum program.
Six years later, she moved to the Bureau of Land Management, where she helped develop a policy for reburial of human remains on public lands.
“It wasn’t the best policy it could be,” she acknowledged at the Affiliated Tribes conference. “It was the best policy we could get at the time.”
At the NMAI, McClellan feels she has come to a place where she can work without compromise for Native people. Travel has taken her out of the office for most of the five months since she started at NMAI. Traveling to Native communities from New Mexico to New York, she hardly has had the leisure to think about her personal journey. But her daughter, now an attorney in Albuquerque, has.
“She never could have imagined when she started junior college that in 2008 she would be in senior management at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Traci said. “It would not have been in her frame of reference.”
McClellan is focused on the job ahead – one that is informed as much by life experience as professional accomplishment.
“I take the responsibility for these relationships with tribes on myself to make sure that we don't lose track of them again,” McClellan said. “Our goal is that if we do this now, we will not need to make this kind of outreach again because we will stay present with communities.”